A bowl of… pink?

One of my favorite idiosyncratic cookbooks is Larry Kusche’s 1977 Popcorn. Circa 1977, because it’s come out in multiple versions, including the wonderfully-spined Popcorn Popcorn Popcorn just to get the point across that This book can change your life!

Three times…

Well, Easter can change your life. Popcorn is fun. And Kusche’s book is a great book for popcorn fans.

This year I’m continuing my Christmas-to-Easter candy cane tradition with Kusche’s Spearmint Crackle. The recipe calls for “chopped spearmint-leaf candies” and a little green food coloring to emphasize the spearmint aspect. But it works very nicely with chopped candy canes and no food coloring at all, leaving the popcorn a nice pastel pink.

I recommend using redskin or Spanish peanuts as the nuts in this caramel corn. The red skin nicely complements the Easter pink of the popcorn’s caramel coating. The nuts should definitely be salted: the salt offsets the sweetness of the sugar. If you use unsalted nuts, add an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of salt.

If you somehow end up with a lot of hard candy and you’re not a hard candy eater—not uncommon after Christmas or Easter—consider using them for making popcorn, too. This recipe should work with any hard candy, especially butterscotch candies or root beer barrels. Or for something really different, try lemon sours. I haven’t, but if I suddenly found myself with a bag of them, I’d seriously consider it.

Try to use only one color, or only a few colors that mix well. My dad had a bunch of fruit-flavored candy canes left over from Christmas 2023. He left them out for the grandkids to eat, but the grandkids were not eating them. I told him in the spring that if they were still there come Thanksgiving I’d be making caramel corn out of them.

Pretty sure this was the source of several BBC special effects in the eighties.

They were still there come Thanksgiving, so I used them. The flavor was great. But the candy canes were so multi-colored that when melted down into syrup all of the colors melded into a weird purple-gray. On the one hand, it made for more popcorn for me. On the other, that’s not a very festive attitude!

Unlike with last year’s Easter Candy-Cane Ice Cream, I am completely unaware of any Catholic or Christian symbolism for popcorn. Well, I was completely unaware until I googled “religious symbolism in popcorn”. Apparently there’s a thriving subculture in creating religious symbolism for anything. The popcorn folks seem to be seriously overreaching, however.

Now, the popcorn kernels represent us, diverse in our responses to God’s call. Some burst early, eager to embrace His plan for their lives… Others are like medium poppers. They witness those around them responding to God’s call and eventually join the flow… Then there are the late poppers, who catch on later… Lastly, there are the non-poppers—the kernels that remain unchanged, rejecting God’s attempts to get their attention and never responding to His call.

Well, as the abbot said to the second monk, God is in everything, and no matter what you are doing, you should be thinking of God. Even eating popcorn.

The Jerries Johnston of the Deseret News rope the Aztecs into Christianity with When God pops your heart like a kernel of corn (to which I want to add a paraphrase of the old Harry Warren/Jack Brooks love song and sing “that’s a-maizing”):

The Lord told Ezekiel: “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.” To the Aztecs, he might just as easily have said, “I will take the hard kernel of your heart and, in the twinkling of an eye, transform it into something light, pure and soft.”

Too many colors make for an unappetizing—and very unfestive—grey caramel corn. Stick to red and white canes for Easter!

Sounds corny to me, but in their defense, if C.S. Lewis was right that pagans retained a kernel of truth from the days of Eden—that “If you are a Christian you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth”¹ then there may well be something to be gleaned, even from a culture as murderous as the Aztecs.

A search for Why popcorn on Christmas trees was a lot more fruitful. Making enough popcorn to string a Christmas tree or house must have made the house smell wonderful. That said, I don’t recommend saving your popcorn strings from Christmas to use on Easter. Unlike candy canes, popped corn’s culinary shelf life is measured in weeks, at best, not years.

The significance of popcorn at Christmas appears to be less religious than that popcorn was what they had and what they could spare. There wasn’t a whole lot to decorate a home with in the early days² of Christmas decorations, and what we might think of as likely Christmas decorations now were far too valuable then. Cranberries were an important foodstuff, for example, and any you had stored away you probably wanted to keep for eating. They didn’t become popular decorations until the 1800s.

Whatever you end up with after the holidays, if you like flavored caramel corn, hard candy is a great way to get unique flavors. It’s also easy to prorate the recipe according to how much hard candy you have left. Just watch the colors!